Govind Rao featured in MedTech Intelligence article

Cardboard Incubator Gives Preemies Better Chance of Survival

By Maria Fontanazza

A low-cost infant incubator is designed to combat two of the three leading causes of infant death.

The first few weeks of life are critical for premature and low birth
weight babies, as their ability to regulate their own body temperature
is not fully developed. Placing the baby in an incubator, essentially a
man-made version of the womb, helps maintain an infant’s temperature and
environment. However, the use of incubators in low-resource countries
is much more difficult, as the products are generally too expensive.

Govind
Rao presenting at the 4th Annual Pediatric Surgical Innovation
Symposium where he was awarded $50,000 from the National Capital
Consortium for Pediatric Device Innovation (NCC-PDI).

“The statistics, especially in lower source environments, are pretty
grim: About every 10 seconds a baby dies, and usually it’s due to
problems of hypothermia or sepsis,” says Govind Rao, Ph.D., professor
and director at the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). “Low birth weight has
become increasingly common as women defer childbirth. If you had an
inexpensive way to intervene and keep baby warm, it would have a
dramatic impact.” Rao added that premature babies born in these
environments are also at risk of infection, because the incubators are
not always effectively cleaned and sanitized. This means that as one
sick baby leaves the incubator, the next baby coming in is highly
susceptible to accepting the infection. “That becomes a highly
problematic issue leading to high mortality,” says Rao.

Know Your User

Govind Rao and his team of students at UMBC have been committed to
improving the odds for preemies and low-birth rate babies in
low-resource environments. What started as a class project evolved into
the development of a low-cost and disposable cardboard incubator
designed to prevent neonatal mortality as a result of preterm birth
and/or infection. Rao assigned the students in his sensors class a
research project to develop a design for a low-cost incubator that would
maintain the baby’s temperature and use as many locally available
resources as possible. After the student teams came up with their
designs, they took a field trip to India, visiting rural healthcare
centers to find out what happens on the front lines.